Two Wheels and Two Questions

While in California, during one of my daily phone conversations with my Spanish girlfriend who works for UNHCR in Bukavu, Congo, I asked for her help on Spanish terminology as I look to improve my understanding of the language that has clearly become second to English in the United States.   My question that day was on the difference between “San” and “Santa” in name-places in the U.S. (Santa Fe, San Francisco, and so on).  Her explanation was (embarrassingly) simple: “San” was masculine; “Santa” was feminine.

“So does that mean Santa Claus is really a girl?”

And we Americans thought other countries were strange.  (America, after all, is the only place I know where you can drive on the parkway and park on the driveway.)

Once I left our family friends in Pleasanton, California, I was generally going eastbound, having reached the apogee of my journey.  Pleasanton (I learned from my girlfriend following my trip in the virtual spaces) was founded by John W. Kottinger, an Alameda County justice of the peace, and named after his friend, Union army cavalry Major General Alfred Pleasonton. A typographical error by a U.S. Postal Service employee apparently led to the current spelling.  In the 1850s, the town was nicknamed “The Most Desperate Town in the West” and it was ruled by bandits and desperados.  Main Street shootouts were not uncommon.  Banditos such as Joaquin Murrieta, upon whom the legend of Zorro is based, would ambush prospectors on their way back from the gold rush fields and then seek refuge in Pleasanton.  Now it’s a bedroom community for those seeking refuge between San Francisco and Sacramento.

At Olmstead Pass in Yosemite National Park.

The ride across central California through the huge truck farms described in some of Steinbeck’s novels, (once again) over the aqueduct, and into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada was uneventful (although traversing Modesto was like negotiating a maze, due to numerous road construction detours).  What helped me balance my first impression of California, having entered in the south over the Mojave Desert, was its agricultural productivity.  What would complete my appreciation of its environmental diversity was Yosemite National Park, the first of the great national parks I would see in the West on my way “back East” (an interesting term).

In 1889, John Muir, then America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, and Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, had growing concerns about the devastating effects of sheep grazing in the high country.  They launched a successful campaign to persuade Congress to set aside this area as a national park in 1890. On October 1, 1890, the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square miles of reserved forest lands, soon to be known as Yosemite National Park.

The Madison River in western Yellowstone National Park. Those small specs along the river are "tatanka" (the Indian word for buffalo). When William Clark explored this area, there were hundreds of thousands of them.

Yellowstone, which is mostly in Wyoming but overlaps into Idaho and Montana as well, was the next major park-way I rode through.  Established by Congress in 1872 and administered by the U.S. Army for a good part of its early years, it is the world’s first national park, evolving as a land-use model from merely a pleasuring ground and wildlife refuge to a biosphere reserve and World Heritage Site.  With over 1,000 miles of backcountry trails, it has more active geysers than Iceland or New Zealand, as the area was formed between two and 1.3 million years ago by volcanic eruptions, the most recent spewing out 240 million cubic miles of debris over its 30-by-40 mile caldera (or basin) in the heart of the park.

I was very surprised to see in Yellowstone, of all places, one of my favorite quotes over my career as a soldier who also tried often to be a diplomat. Very much the truth, by the way, which is why it's not an easy job.

The national park system in the United States became official under the pen of Woodrow Wilson in 1916, just prior to America’s entrance into the Great War in Europe, and with it the beginning of the end of America’s self-imposed isolationism and its rise as a global power, quietly signaled by its becoming the world’s largest creditor nation.  The initial impulse was in response to what Steinbeck calls the “savagery and thoughtlessness with which our early settlers approached this rich continent…  It was full late when we began to realize that the continent did not stretch out to infinity; that there were limits to the indignities to which we could subject it… Conservation came to us slowly, and much of it hasn’t arrived yet”, he wrote in the early 1960’s.

But it was Theodore Roosevelt, the celebrated conservation president, who had the greatest impact, extending well beyond his term as chief executive from 1901 to 1909. In that period, he signed legislation establishing five national parks.  Another Roosevelt enactment had a broader effect, however: the Antiquities Act of June 8, 1906.  While not creating a single park itself, the Act enabled Roosevelt and his successors to proclaim historic landmarks, historic or prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest in federal ownership as national monuments.  By the end of 1906 he had proclaimed four.  The first was Devil’s Tower, Wyoming.

Devil's Tower from the southeast.

He was also prepared to interpret that authority expansively, protecting a large portion of the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908. By the end of his term he had reserved six predominantly cultural areas and twelve predominantly natural areas in this way.  Later presidents also used the Antiquities Act to proclaim national monuments, 105 in all. Forty-nine of them retain this designation today; others have been re-titled national parks or otherwise reclassified by Congress.  The Antiquities Act is the original authority for about a quarter of the nearly 380 areas composing the national park system today.

Roosevelt perceived back then what today could be called “environmental power” – that conservation was not simply a moral act or an end in itself.  It was also a matter of national security and prosperity.  I had always wondered why he was the fourth president to appear on the face on Mount Rushmore; now, having seen much of his handwork and understanding its implications, I knew why.

In his seventh annual message to Congress in December 1907, Roosevelt noted that “…the conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life…  As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have.  The reward of foresight for this nation is great and easily foretold.  But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”

As I looked upon the great national parks of the West, I gained a greater appreciation of what Roosevelt envisioned.  Although only 3.6% of the territory of the United States is managed by the National Park Service, assisted by nearly 150,000 volunteers, and its budget is about three billion dollars per year, the parks draw nearly 300 million visitors at the same time, generating 14 billion dollars of economic activity.  But most importantly, 30-40% of those who see the physical grandeur of the United States are from foreign countries, contributing to a more positive image of America.  As soft power becomes increasingly important, and as it becomes more difficult to preserve the world’s natural treasures in the face of overpopulation and fierce economic demand (witness the disappearance of much of wild Africa), this comparative advantage the United States currently enjoys will become even more precious and take on new meaning.

Yes, this is California. In June.

After having seen snow and ice in California in June, battled torrential downpours after failing to witness a full eruption of Old Faithful, crossed the Continental Divide in a downpour, rode along windy, steep cliffs to gaze upon the vast and expansive vistas of the Rocky Mountains, with hardly a sign of human presence, and seen two of the greatest outdoor sculptures in the world, one natural and one man-made, it was clear to me that the country’s physical attributes alone make Americans a truly fortunate people.

Following my return from Liberia and the wonderful family get-together in Simi Valley, on Monday the 7^th of June, I was road bound again.  It was good to be back on the Harley after two weeks.  Southern California, however, was anything but warm and sunny as I made my way to the Pacific Coast Highway, although the weather improved as I got out from under the “June gloom” of fog and low-lying clouds that never seem to deposit any rain.  After lunch at Pismo Beach, I stopped off at San Simeon and visited the State Historical Monument known as “Hearst Castle” the next morning.

The main quarters of Hearst Castle, with room for 115 guests. Modeled after a 13th century Spanish castle. The Egyptian artifacts are real, and believed to precede the time of Tutankhaman, about 3,500 years.

William Randolph Hearst, the great entrepreneur and newspaper magnate who defined the modern day influence of the media on politics, wanted to be known most as a builder.  One of many he had in the U.S. and Europe and the site of his boyhood camping playground, “La Cuesta Encantada” (the Enchanted Hill as Hearst named it) went over to the State of California after his death in 1951 and has been a money-maker since.  When I first saw its opulent Mediterranean Revival guest and main houses, its prodigious collection of art and artifacts from mostly Europe and the Middle East, it struck me as the ultimate in self-indulgence by a nouveaux riche American who could afford to spare no expense in materialistic acrobatics.  But, as I began to learn more about how Hearst and his chief architect, Julia Morgan, meticulously blended its style with the surrounding land, along with the carefully chosen and placed collection, I couldn’t help but agree with the architectural historian, Lord John Julius Norwich, that “Hearst Castle is a palace in every sense of the word”.

View to the Pacific from Hearst Castle.

Except that I would add it is a truly American palace, for hardly anywhere else could something so entirely new come from something fundamentally old.  I had also learned that Hearst, along with many other wealthy Americans such as the Fords, the Carnegies, Gettys, Rockefellers, and so on, collected artifacts and artwork originally obtained from European aristocrats who were broke or under pressure to abandon their belongings for political reasons in the 20’s and 30′s. In this way, a great many treasures were preserved that otherwise might have been looted or destroyed during the Spanish Civil War or World War II.

Although it is common knowledge that wealthy families in the United States, in recognition of their good fortune and what is now called “corporate social responsibility”, have organized and contributed to many charities and foundations, I was not aware of this cultural aspect of their largesse.  While the kind of generosity of, for example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not unique to the United States and to the rich, this kind of American exceptionalism is still rather trademark and unparalleled in scale.  Jon Steinbeck, in his discussion of the nearly endless paradoxes of America and Americans, remarked that “…if we have enough of the gold – we contribute it back to the nation in the form of foundations and charities”.  I have often pointed out to many non-Americans that, for every dollar they see in humanitarian or development assistance from the public sector, there is anywhere between two to four times as much donated from the private sector.  Most of the largest and most well-established NGOs in the world are headquartered in the U.S.  Another characteristic comparative advantage of the United States, particularly in terms of soft power.  Much of this has to do with the unique relationship between the individual and the state in America, particularly in the deep-seated distrust of the former in the latter.

The Pacific Coast Highway approaching Big Sur.

During a short interlude as I departed San Simeon to take a look at the elephant seals basking in the sun at Point Piedras Blancas, I met up with another lone biker, a German fellow riding from Florida to San Francisco, and shared the ride with him up the “PCH” as far as my next stop in Monterey.  The ride itself posed a dilemma to either look at the magnificent scenery or run my bike off the steep mountainsides than ran directly into the Pacific.  It was also ironic to not only have seen my first zebras in the wild in California (and not Africa); additionally, I spoke more German on the West Coast than I had in years, between my extended family in Simi Valley (that is, the original immigrants, as the next generation, in characteristic fulfillment of the American assimilation ethic, hardly spoke enough to order a schnitzel) and running into numerous Central European adventurers looking for a taste of freedom on two wheels.

The stopover in Monterey had three purposes.  The first and least important was to take a look around one of California’s most prosperous communities.  The second and most important was to enjoy lunch with a dear friend and colleague from the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the rare serious historians on U.S. civil affairs and civil-military operations.  She pointed out to me that – beyond the more storied examples of the U.S. military’s involvement in military government and what is now called “stability operations” in Texas before it became a state, during Reconstruction after the Civil War, throughout most of the West as the frontier expanded across the continent in the 19^th century, in the Philippines and the Caribbean in the early 20^th century, and in Germany and Japan in the wake of World War II – Monterey, California had its own contribution to that history.

California's Consitution Hall in Monterey, which was the first capital of the California Republic until it became a (non-slave) state in 1850.

After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to end the war with Mexico, California was under military governance until General Bennett Riley, the seventh military governor, grew impatient with the inability of a Congress obsessed with the balance of slave and non-slave states to form a territorial government.  He took the initiative to convene civilian leaders for a constitutional convention in Monterey, serving informally as California’s first capitol.  The Constitution, written in both English and Spanish, also enabled what Navy Chaplain Walter Colton (for whom the constitutional hall is named) described as the “fecundity of the Californians” to be exercised in proposition voting – a unique aspect of California politics that persists today.  Less than a year later, in September 1850, California joined the Union as the 31^st state.

For me, this was just another example of the paradox of the role of the U.S. military in nation-building, dispelling the argumentum of the “warfighter” class in the U.S. military since the first peace operations of the 1990’s that the U.S. military should not do “nation-building” and limit itself to more “traditional” roles such as combat and big wars.  With a media (and our political, economic, and cultural elites) now with hardly any military experience or depth of understanding of U.S. history, the common perception in the American public is that the military’s involvement in “stability operations” and nation-building is a new phenomenon.  Here again, the notion that the point of reference for U.S. national security engagements is World War II and the Cold War is eclipsed by examples of the military’s involvement in “irregular” operations going back for centuries.  In fact, the predominant form of military engagement in U.S. history has been in “small wars” as nicely depicted in Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace.

Thus, one of the main problems with our national security establishment is that it remains dominated by the “military industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned about, predicated on a big war mentality in a world of small wars, technology obsessed, budget-driven, overwhelmingly focused on major combat, and risk-averse.  The controversy, as in so many aspects of U.S. politics, is presented as “either/or” – either we are able fight wars or escort children to kindergartens.  It is not, however, been “either/or” but “both” (or in military parlance, full-spectrum operations).  Fortunately, policy and doctrine has begun to recognize that.  The paradigm, however, has not shifted until it’s reflected as well in budgets, programs, and operations.  As anyone in the policy business will tell you, the devil, as always, is in the details.

Some still resist this, based on weak and credible grounds.  The more specious, as I’ve heard for some time since the 90’s, is that the rules of engagement in places like Afghanistan are too complex and restrictive for the troops on the ground – he can’t be both a trained killer and a policeman.  My answer to that was:  try explaining baseball or (American) football to someone unfamiliar with these complex and rules-intensive sports known to most Americans, who incidentally live in one of the world’s most litigious societies.  To say the American soldier is unable to grasp such complex rules in the heat of combat is to sell that young person short.  What they need, more than the rules, is a greater understanding of the political-military and cultural contexts of their operations.  Some like myself have spent a good part of our careers in the field doing just that.  American service men and women are always at their best when they understand not what they’re doing as much as why they’re doing it.

(Sports are a good analogy, by the way.   For Americans, the world is more like baseball or football – set-piece with clearly define rules and “end states” and points-productive.  For the rest of the world, it’s like soccer - highly interpretive, free-flowing, difficult to follow, and often without a clear outcome.  Watching the World Cup has hopefully given some Americans more insight into how the rest of the world perceives the international order, although I doubt most have made that connection.)

The more credible reason has to do with risk.  Apparently, what seems to be occurring in Afghanistan with respect to the rules of engagement is that, the further down the chain, the more precautions leaders are taking in order not to find themselves in trouble – not with the locals but with their superiors.   A good part of this is explainable by the all-pervasive, 24/7 media environment we find ourselves in today, where the margin for error is small and unforgiving.  The temptation, therefore, is to error on the side of caution, creating and extremely difficult situation for regular forces and handing over a distinctly great advantage to irregular adversaries.

However, a great deal of this extends from the equally pervasive risk-averse culture the pervades the contemporary U.S. military.  I witnessed the development of this during the latter half of my own career, when in the days of the “peace dividend” pursued in the wake of the Cold War, the sharp drawdown of the military forces resulted in the “zero-defects” mentality that I saw at play in the Balkans, when American troops were subjected to byzantine (and often embarrassing) rules for “force protection”, which was Mission Number One for many senior commanders right up to and following 9/11.  Many justified this with the image of “Blackhawk Down”, perpetuating the near-myth that, after Somalia in 1992, the American public had no stomach for casualties in the half-wars of that time (and thus substantiating the Pentagon’s resistance to the commitment of American troops to the Balkans, Rwanda or anything else that did not resemble a “real war”).  Those were some of the darker days of my career, as I saw that, from a leadership standpoint, the Army did not get better as it got smaller – many who had talent and who were outspoken either left or were forced out among those competing for fewer promotions.   In other words, conformity was reinforced – the “yes men” stayed as the military has less room for iconoclasts.  Fortunately, some very exceptional leaders still made it to the top, and there are many fine flag officers leading our troops today.  Nevertheless, this aspect of the military culture still lingers – and the risk aversion is as much characteristic of career-conscious civilian leadership in, for example, in the State Department.

Throughout all of our government structure involved with foreign and national security policy, military and civilian, we need to emphasis risk management over risk avoidance, give them better tools operate in such environments, and do a better job in our information strategy to inform the constituent public at home and abroad on these risks.  The media in particular needs to help explain these issues in greater strategic and historical context, more than they may have felt obligated to do in an earlier time.

Over particularly the last third of my career, it has also become clear to me that, if we are to get the interagency balance right in terms of foreign and national security policy, then we need a fundamental understanding of the civil-military relationship in strategic, operational, and tactical senses, based on the civil-military relationship in American society, as described in the Constitution and throughout U.S. history; namely, that with the possible exception of major combat operations, the military is the supporting agency and the civilian agencies are supported (size does not matter here).  Statesman should always take precedence over soldiers.  Additionally, the role of the military is as an enabler to those agencies and their activities (such as “nation-building”) in order to work itself out of those (civilian) jobs (which, by the way, have not always been traditionally done by civilian agencies, as USAID, the UN, or NGOs did not exist before World War II).

My (not entirely singular view of civil-military operations) is really an application of the paradoxical concept of deterrence I once heard (to be able to fight in order not to have to): to be able to do nation-building in order not to have to.  The concept of civil-military coordination I had put in place in Liberia, also a model for the emerging UN military policy on CIMIC – emphasized that “it’s not about us; it’s about them”, and that “winning hearts and minds” is not the real goal.  Rather, civil-military coordination is about managing the interaction between civil and military players and, most importantly, the transition from crisis response and security operations to self-sustained development in such a way that minimized risks and structured local communities and nations as much as possible for success.  Teach them how to fish, not give them one (which by the way shows more respect and wins more hearts and minds longer term), and do a few things well rather than everything half-baked, less being more.

One thing that was clear to me in Liberia that will no doubt become even more salient in Afghanistan in the next couple of years – that when international military presence that underpins stability there is leaving, the trick is to shrink potentially destabilizing gaps in self-sustained capacity and confidence before the military’s ability to do this was too insignificant.  Security and development or coefficients of each other.

Cannery Row in Monterey, site of one of John Steinbeck's most famous novels.

The third reason to stop in Monterey was to see Cannery Row, the setting of one of the works (of the same name) of John Steinbeck, with Samuel Langhorne Clemens, one of my favorite American fictional writers.  From Monterey, I rode to Salinas and stopped in at the Steinbeck Museum, which proved to be very educational.   In addition to the insights I had forgotten since the first time I read Travels with Charley (which I have now re-read), much the inspiration for my own journey around America, I learned that Steinbeck had been a war correspondent, resulting in two books that I didn’t know of:  Once There Was a War and America and the Americans (which I am now reading).

Next to Mark Twain, Steinbeck is my favorite American fictional writer. This quote was very eye-opening, and prompted me to re-read "Travels with Charley", which I hadn't done since I was a teenager.

As I continued to Pleasanton and took a look at San Francisco, following what I had seen and thought about in Monterey, I began to think about the builders and artists in America, how they have shaped the country, and what that may portend for the future.  As I realized while riding through the Southwest, there is a great deal of tension in the United States between them, given that in this commercial republic of pragmatic, results-oriented people, science tends to garner much more socioeconomic status than art.  We prefer experts to philosophers.

And yet, the icons of American culture – from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge (and everything between) reflect the triumph of fusing art and science.  This is similarly true of our national security and military culture – our most celebrated military leaders, such as Robert E. Lee and George Patton, were more artists in their trade, as Eisenhower and Marshall were soldier-statesmen.  Builders make things; artists make sense of them.  Builders bring things to form; artists contextualize them.  Builders are conscientious of risk; artists are enamored with opportunity.

Like many things I was reminded of on the Pacific Coast, they go together – not “either/or” but “both”.

Just a few months before my retirement, I came across a remarkable speech by John F. Kennedy given at Amherst after the passing of Robert Frost and less than a month from his own demise.  Although I have always felt Americans have neglected the potency of cultural power and the role artists have played and must continue to play if the country is to remain viable and relevant in the world, I could not have articulated now it as well as he did then:

“In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments…  The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us…  Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much…  When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.  When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.  When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.  For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment…  The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.”

And, as did Kennedy:

“I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.  I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future…  I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.  I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.  And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.”

The day after taking in the Reagan Library, on the 24^th of May, I took a flight from Burbank to Washington-Reagan via Dallas.  Two days later I joined 13 graduate students and the Director of the George Mason University Peace Operations Policy Program on an annual field trip to look at, take note of, and write observations about the United Nations Mission in Liberia, or UNMIL.

It wasn’t my intention originally to do this.  However, while planning my sojourn earlier this year, the Program Director called me to ask if I could accompany the students this year because of my experience in Liberia (for the past few years, GMU-POPP had taken its trip to Haiti; obviously, that was not an option this year).  From January 2008 to July 2009, I had served my last overseas tour of duty in uniform as the Senior U.S. Military Observer and Chief of Civil-Military Coordination (or CIMIC) at UNMIL.

How I wound up there is a story in itself.  The reason I performed that tour of duty, rather than take up General Petreaus’s offer of being a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) chief was because of this opportunity.  I explained that it was my sensing that I would gain experience and insights, as well as make contributions, that had wider and longer-term implications for our country’s ability to conduct “theater engagement” and this would ultimately bring more value-added, from a strategic standpoint.  Petraeus agreed (to my relief – how do you say “no” to a four-star?).

What I didn’t tell the General was what Paul Harvey called “the rest of the story”; namely, that I felt Iraq and Afghanistan are “emerging legacy operations” (we’re just trying to figure out how to get out of those places).  The kind of thing I would do at UNMIL would eventually be more representative of our national security engagements in the 21^st century:  Low-visibility military “engagement” or conflict prevention operations involving collaboration with numerous players from multiple agencies and organizations, working toward common goals, albeit in different ways, and most importantly, in multinational settings where the U.S. was not leading any “coalitions of the willing”.

We would have to learn to get in the sandbox and play with the others, and for this our defense establishment has thin experience and expertise.  There are only about 30 officers from all services who serve at any given time in UN peacekeeping operations.  I was fortunate to be the most senior and have the largest contingent, as well as to have done this for 18 months, rather than the standard six months (albeit this is now one year).  In a type of business that requires a feeling for what’s happening on the ground through extensive networking, you just can’t parachute into these places and expect to make a difference in such short time, although that has been often the expectation.

Pointing to the way ahead with Bangladeshi peacekeepers in Gbarnga, Liberia. I was then a very unusual sight - a senior American officer wearing a blue UN hat.

UNMIL was by no means my first tour overseas – I had spent 20 of the last 30 years in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, learning many things about those places, and perhaps most importantly, the view of America as non-Americans see it.  No doubt, the United States will itself have to become more of a team player in the interdependent world it has largely created through globalization – economically, culturally, and of course politically and militarily.  I’ve often said to my international colleagues:  “The world’s challenges are so many, so huge, and so important, that even if we had perfect cooperation we couldn’t solve them all, given our limited resources.  Even then, we would have to prioritize.  That means even greater cooperation.”

Another thing I’ve learned is that no one human category – race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, profession, etc., has a disproportionate share of either genius or idiocy.  Americans are no better than anyone else; they’re just luckier.

It was with that gained appreciation that I thought helping this group of young Americans learn more about a world beyond their shores, as someone who had been there and done that, would give value to my own experiences and insights.  So when the Program Director nonchalantly told me George Mason would simply fly me from California back to Washington to take the trip and return, I realized a couple of things.  First, this fit the paradigm of the globalized 21^st century, where information, people, and things can move more rapidly than anyone a century before (or perhaps even John Steinbeck) could have imagined.  Second, this really was part of my trip.  If I was to traverse America to better understand it nowadays, then it was mandatory I do this not just from the inside out, but from the outside in.

In a sense, this was a first for me as well – until this time, I had never returned to any of the places where I had been deployed and gain a perspective a posteriori.

With George Mason University students after a discussion with Ellen Margarethe Loej, Special Representative of the Secretary General for the United Nations Mission in Liberia.

It turned out to be a gratifying experience.  What the students couldn’t help but notice was how warmly I was being greeted by so many people I had come to know, almost by the minute, as we walked through the UNMIL headquarters and around Monrovia.  They joked that I was the “Don of Liberia”, but I realized it had a teaching point for them; namely, that this kind of work (and thus most of our foreign engagements) is really about relationship-building, fostering a level of trust and confidence, based on mutual respect and personal engagement, in order to move things along a path of progression and not regression.  It was the process, not the product, as creating peace in essence is.

As with the young officers I mentored during my tour in Liberia, the students were impressed with the enormous difficulty of multinational peace operations and yet the common sense of commitment among so many different walks of life.  Eye-opening for most Americans, who because of their “splendid isolation” (from which neither 9/11 nor the recent financial crisis has shaken) are woefully ignorant about what goes on beyond their shores (that increasingly affects them) or how other people think, especially about Americans (which likewise increasingly affects them).

What these students saw is a bit of what I learned over 20 years overseas – that not everybody loves us; but, that’s not all bad, either.  Along a sliding scale, you can almost classify the attitudes of those who look at America or Americans – a small minority of fundamentalist or extremist groups (oh, by the way, Americans have a few of our own) who simply hate us because our way of life and culture represents a threat to their own vision of the world; a much larger group who both envy and resent the United States, as they would anyone on top; still more who would like to more openly like us but find it hard to do; and, a minority who openly do.

What has tipped the scales over the past few years is not just the perception of “American hegemony” since the fall of the Soviet Union and the inevitability of the relative decline of American power; moreover, the attitudes we ourselves have portrayed, mainly through our policies.  After 9/11, many Americans were shocked to find out that not only there were people who hated us, but that there were so many others who sympathized with them.  Why?  Because, while we talked the talked about freedom, self-determination, and human rights, we sometimes didn’t walk the walk.  It was the growing gap of contradiction between what we stand for and what we do, as well as at times our lack of humility, or an (unusually) overt love of country that delved into jingoism, and an inability or unwillingness to listen to others who may just have a better way.

Much of our frustration is also rooted in “American exceptionalism” – the theory that we’re qualitatively different because of our national credo, political and religious institutions, geography and environment, historical evolution and destiny, political and religious institutions, physical and social mobility, frontier spirit and optimism, and perhaps most importantly, immigrant and assimilation culture.  It’s been used to explain everything from why we should stay out of foreign entanglements (isolationism), why we should get involved (interventionism), why do not have to seek concurrence from the world for our actions (unilateralism), or why, for example, our troops should not be tried by international courts for war crimes (legal exceptionalism).

It’s also because Americans, much more than others, find themselves astride the quandary between their and the realism of a world that Robert Kagan has called “Hobbesian”.  We try to do the right thing, sometimes the wrong way, because of this, leading to that famous observation by Churchill.  Because America is one of the few countries in the world that is “about something” much larger than itself, it has set standards for human behavior that itself struggles to gain and maintain; and thus, as “all politics are local”, the U.S. at times falls short of its own ideals and therefore resonates hypocrisy.  Due to its inefficient and imperfect form of government that looks to take on the whole problematic of humanity, the United States is least qualified to be Chairman of the Board of Planetary Management; and yet, for that very reason, it also is.

It also is because America has all the trappings of an imperial power save one – it lacks an imperial culture.  An appropriately incompetent superpower. I once pointed out to a friend of mine from Pakistan (where theories of American imperial ambitions are rife), when marveling at pictures of thousands of aircraft deposited in “boneyards” in Arizona, that “that was nothing: in 1945, the U.S. possessed 50,000 combat aircraft, 5,000 naval ships, 96 divisions, 11 million men under arms, 45% of the world’s gross national product, and of course had a monopoly of nuclear weapons.  If America were to have taken over the world, that would have been the moment.  Instead, we did the Marshall Plan.”

Here again, as I realized when I started this cross-country trip, balance seems to be even more crucial than ever.  Not always “either/or” with respect to idealism or realism, coercion or persuasion, hard or soft power – but, as much as possible, both, wisely applying a combination of Theodore Roosevelt’s advice to “speak softly and carry a big stick” and Harry Truman’s that: “If we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy, if we wish to restore hope to those who have already lost their civil liberties, if we wish to fulfill the promise that is ours, we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.  We know the way.  We need only the will.”

While leading those American officers in Liberia, I gave them three watchwords – “professionalism”, “discipline”, and “humility” (related to those three words at New Mexico Military Institute, “duty”, “honor”, and “achievement”).  The first was to do more than fall back on their education and training – when in doubt, be what you already are.  The second was best explained by the Air Force – “doing the right thing even when nobody is looking”.  The third, incorporates the maturity of balance – “everyone knows you belong to the biggest, baddest military – don’t advertise it, instead come in low”.  Again, to channel Theodore Roosevelt, power (especially hard power) is most effective when implied and not applied.  By being humble and restrained when we don’t necessarily have to be, we gain greater, longer-lasting respect.  (Strategy is patient; tactics are harried.) That’s how you combine hard and soft power.

Sure, Americans are exceptional, but if we truly are confident in our exceptionalism, then we don’t need to go out of our way to point it out to people or insist on special treatment.  I’ve seen many of our young men and women, mostly in uniform, who have served among others overseas, and they are most effective when they are most themselves.  There is, after all, something quite good about the American character.  It speaks for itself, as Goethe once said great art does.  These students did likewise.  They came well prepared, were genuinely interested, asked penetrating questions, and yet were humble, impressing most of their hosts.

As for me, I have found my own confident humility in the gratitude of having been in places, done things, and met people most Americans can only imagine, knowing it has made me both a better American and a better human being.  I left Liberia, for the second time, a bit more hopeful than the last, because I had a better vantage point of seeing that from the outside in.

U.S. 93 North into Nevada was thankfully smooth, with long stretches of straight road through expanses of desert less colorful and without the dramatic rock formations that typify Arizona.  Southern Nevada is more like New Mexico, but more brown than green and with mountain formations that look almost like another planet than Earth, even though it was spring.  The desert air was dry and cool, as long as you kept moving.  It was surprisingly comfortable riding in the midday sun through the Mojave Desert the next day, and equally surprising to realize that southern California is essentially an extension of this brown desert, all the way into the greater Los Angeles area.

Truly amazing, when you think of how many people inhabit this area.  On first impression, when entering California this way, it looks like nothing more than a gigantic desert leading to the Pacific Ocean.  You wonder what it is that’s so great about the state – and don’t come to that realization until you’ve seen a lot more of it.  California is the cornucopia of the cornucopia called America.

Hoover Dam, looking from the Arizona side.

In this leg of the trip, I saw three more examples of America’s conquest of nature through technology.  The first was Hoover Dam, in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada. Started in 1931 and completed in 1936, it was then both the world’s largest hydroelectric power generating station and the world’s largest concrete structure. (It is currently the world’s 38th-largest hydroelectric generating station.)  It is interesting to note that this infrastructure project required eight years to pass through Congress during the Roaring Twenties, when the U.S. Government was flush with money, and work continued through the Great Depression, with 112 associated deaths.  How would the media have handled that today?

"Sin City"?

Then there is Las Vegas, where I stayed overnight and caught a comedy show. The city’s gambling industry, connections with organized crime and tolerance for various forms of adult entertainment (although southern California is actually the porn capital of the world) earned it the title of “Sin City”.  Ironically and less well-known, however, Las Vegas also has the highest number of churches per capita of any major U.S. city.  Contrary to the legend about mobsters founding the city at a crossroads in the late 1940’s, Las Vegas started as a stopover on the pioneer trails to the west, and became a popular railroad town in the early 1900s.  Nevertheless, it is situated in one of the most desolate areas of the U.S., in thriving defiance of the natural world that Americans love but still strive to subdue.

The California Aqueduct, near Modesto, CA.

Even more so is southern California, which would not exist except for the Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct, a system of canals, tunnels, and pipelines that conveys water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and somewhat more lush valleys hundreds of miles to the north.  Construction began in 1963 and the system was fully operating in 1997.  During that time frame, California had overtaken New York (my home state) as the Union’s most populous and economically viable state, surpassing in fact France as the world’s fifth largest economy (if, of course, California were its own country), marking a shift in America’s socioeconomic and cultural shift of center of gravity from the East to the West, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from a foreign and national security policy less concerned with Europe and more attentive to Asia, with the rise of Japan and China (and less noticeably India).  Also during that time frame, the Cold War peaked and unexpectedly ended.

When I pulled into my father’s cousin’s house in Simi Valley, CA, the trip odometer read 3,594.4 miles.  I was now retired from a career of military service that began during the Cold War and ended in a very different time, where just about everything was rapidly becoming globalized.  Hilda was one among a number of my grandmother’s maternal bloodline who emigrated to the United States from a small village named Bindersbach in western Germany following the Second World War – the last great movement of Germans to America.  Many stayed with my father’s family in the Bronx for few months before taking a train across the country for three days, with only a few sandwiches, to join the others in Simi Valley.  Now, at least two more generations have grown up there, obviously more American than German (many don’t speak more than word or two).  Despite the onset of large numbers of Asians and Hispanics in the past 20 years, about one out of every five in the United States can claim at least partial ancestry to German-speaking Europe, still the single largest ethnic grouping.

Hilda’s husband, Dick, met her in the United States, shortly after being drafted into the Army as the Korean War was winding down, not long before my father and uncle joined the Air Force.  Dick was the classic American soldier in many ways.  He hated the Army (or so he says) and was scheming to get out as soon as he joined.  Nevertheless, judging by his countless, animated stories, he was very good at his job as a tank mechanic and looks back on his time then as character-building.  He talked much more about those first three years of his career than the 40 or so that followed.  While he may have disdained military service then, he shows not a hint of shame in recalling it now.

Do the good guys always wear white hats?

Hilda took me as a matter of first order to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, now Simi Valley’s most famous attraction since the early 1990’s and even more so since the death of the 40^th President a few years back, prompting a national discussion of his legacy and with it that of the Cold War.  I was personally interested in taking a look for a couple of reasons.  First, because my military career began just a few months prior to the Reagan era which concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall; and secondly, I wanted to gain an impression of how President Reagan’s estate was portraying that legacy.

It didn’t take that long.  As I wandered through the displays and recounted the major events of those years, it was apparent to me that the estate and its supporters wished to portray “The Gipper” as the towering figure that brought down the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union (a “military industrial complex with and economy”) through the overwhelming industrial, technological, and financial superiority of the United States (an economy with a military industrial complex).  In addition to the kind of simplistic morality play of the B-grade movies the former actor played in (good guys in white hats, bad guys in black), the Reagan era was touted as a time of “peace through strength”.  Americans love their moral and political interpretations of history and the world outside them dumbed-down, so no wonder the appeal of mythologizing his legacy as such and feeding a nostalgia that still very much affects the current debates on America and its place in the world.  Indeed, the bipolar world that emerged from the most violent war in the history of mankind, ushering in a nuclear age that made the suicide of our species wholly possible, was much easier to decipher than the one we find ourselves in today.

Looking at a collage of the Reagan years.

But even the world today grew out of one that, upon closer examination, was a bit more complex than at first glance.  History, if anything, is a continuum (or as Mark Twain said, “…it may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme”).  I remember, while taking up an apartment in the house of two history professors who became dear friends of mine while studying in Washington in the early ‘80s, being asked (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) why on Earth I wanted to study history, my response was: “How can you know where you are or where you’re going unless you know where you’ve come from?”

Americans are (almost famously) an a-historic (and consequently a-strategic) folk.  In a sense, that’s a good thing in that they are more free of the shackles of the past that seem to restrict most others in the world when confronting change; however, the overwhelming concern with the here-and-now (intellectually rooted in William  James’ late 19^th century philosophy of American pragmatism) is also confining and has led to many of the troubles they find themselves in today (among them the now-crippling deficit spending that began during the Reagan era, when, in 1984, the U.S. suddenly transformed from the world’s largest creditor nation, a place it held since 1918, to the world’s largest debtor country).

The halcyon days of the Second World War and the Cold War that resulted were an anomaly of world history, although Americans model their view of war and international engagement on it (they are uncomfortable with the idea that there won’t be a ticker-tape parade to mark the end of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as was done after Desert Storm).  In many ways, the “new world order” Reagan’s successor announced began to look much like the older world order of the messy and indefinable coalition conflicts of 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century multipolar politics.   Except that it’s now even more complicated by globalization and the rise of non-state and transnational actors, coupled with sub-national fragmentation, that tear at the fabric of nation-states and the whole notion of sovereignty that Americans still cling to.  Then there is the 24/7 information world that has flattened political decision cycles to a constant instant and made it difficult to “think in time” before having to respond, leaving the country in many ways to lurch from one crisis to the next.

Thus, in order to understand where we are today, my visit to the Reagan Library reminded me, we must better understand where we were, and the evidence of some of that was right there.

In fairness, the museum did make mention of Reagan’s diplomatic engagement and his support of the Pope and the Solidarity movement in Poland that was instrumental in bringing the collapse of communism.  And it also cited Reagan’s other famous role as the “Great Communicator”.  Regardless of how one felt about his policies (and his many public speaking inaccuracies such as the false understanding of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”), Reagan was able to very effectively connect with a wide range of Americans and convey his evolving vision (something, incidentally, an equally capable young president today could probably do more to emulate).

But what really brought down the Berlin Wall were not the half-million U.S. troops in Central Europe, the ICBMs in silos in the Plains States, or the arms race and “Star Wars” that helped bankrupt the Soviets.  What brought down the Communist bloc were the rising expectations of people living there.  To illustrate:  With the exception of one corner East Germany, West German television (much radio) was receivable, allowing East Germans to see their neighbors to the West, for example, driving Mercedes, Audi, and BMW while they waited a dozen years for a plastic, two-stroke, 26-hp car (the Trabant) manufactured in the “Worker’s Paradise”.  The lie of communism had become too obvious.  It was not Gorbachev who tore down the Wall, despite Reagan’s exhortations; it was das Volk.

The relationship between soft and hard power that framed the American strategy of the Cold War is encapsulated in NSC-68.  For anyone who wishes to understand the core American approach to the strategy of containment, of which the presidential doctrines from Truman to Reagan were adaptations, reading this document is a must.  It is similarly helpful in understanding how we could be approaching American foreign policy and national security strategy in the 21^st century.  In NSC-68, diplomacy (not defense) is in the lead, and the role of military or hard power is a holding (or fixing) action until moral or soft power, the offensive element, has had a chance to help the Soviet system collapse under the weight of its own self-contradictions through the “corrosive power of freedom” – which is precisely what happened.

I remember witnessing the combination of American hard and soft power, by which the whole of our engagement was greater the sum of the parts, in many ways and at different levels of engagement, from the pedestrian to the political.  Based on my experience as an international relations analyst for the U.S. Army in Heidelberg from August 1989 (just  before the fall of the Berlin Wall) to June 1993 (after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Desert Storm, and the outbreak of the war in the Balkans), I wrote an American Council on Germany Occasional Paper in 1999, “Legacies of the U.S. Military Presence in Germany for Peace Operations”.  In it, I observed:  “ In the more than half century since 1945, at least 15 million American military personnel, civilian employees, and family members spent part of their lives working and living in the Federal Republic of Germany…  In this regard, the stationing of American troops in Central Europe, though not its first intended purpose, was one of the most successful peacebuilding operations, of a sort, in history.”

"Guns N' Ideas"

Of all the quotes I saw in the Reagan Library, I thought this one from Joseph Stalin was most revealing:  “Ideas are more powerful than guns.  We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”  Later on, while visiting the John Steinbeck Museum to the north in Salinas, I came upon this remark he made at the time the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961:  “I’m amazed that anybody would confess so completely that he failed.  That’s what this amounts to.  A failure in competition, a failure in everything.  It’s like a little kid who takes his football home when he can’t play very well.  I don’t understand that ability to confess failure.  I can’t see that this wall has any other purpose.”

Fast forward 4o years – in the same sense, weren’t the attacks on September 11^th the temper tantrum of those pursuing an ideology that could not compete with Western liberal democracy and thus resorted to a violent, “asymmetric” expression of that failure to compete?  The Islamic fundamentalists poked us in the eye – and so far, we’ve taken the bait, responding primarily with hard power (like in the Whack-a-Mole game) in a way that has degraded our moral power and ultimately, all other forms.

If our success in dealing with the threat of communism was one that played our greatest strengths that  correspondingly attacked our adversaries main weakness, then shouldn’t we be doing the same now?

After I returned to Simi Valley from my “operational pause” in Liberia, Hilda and Dick threw me a wonderful backyard barbeque party to reacquaint myself with once-seen relatives (and some I have never seen) and learn even more about my past, including sharing photos and stories that I heard for the first time but somehow felt were familiar.  Knowing more about where I’ve been will certainly help me understand better where I am now, and where I may be going.

If I had thought I had seen the worst of the windy weather along Interstate 10 in Louisiana and Texas, I was mistaken.  After a pleasant ride from Roswell and two days in Santa Fe, I headed down (losing about 3,000 feet in altitude) to Albuquerque and turned west on Interstate 40.  For the over 300 miles before veering off towards Sedona at Flagstaff, Arizona, I wrestled with constant headwind gusts of up to 50 mph (70 kph) caused by an oncoming front and seasonal atmospherics, as explained by the park ranger at the Petrified Forest National Park.  She informed me that the previous day the winds had reached 60 mph and only a few days before that the winds had forced closure of the highway.  By the time I rolled into the stunningly picturesque scenery of the “Red Rock Valley” along U.S. 89A – a road you can barely keep your eyes on due to the vistas and yet risk great peril in not doing so, with its countless switchbacks along steep mountainsides – I felt my physical reserves as low as the half-liter of fuel I estimated left in the tank, not sure of which would run out first.  A route of 430 miles that should have taken just over six hours took nearly 10.  I spent what evening I had left taking in the hot tub and ordering delivery of cheap Italian food, and going to bed too early.  The benefit, however, of waking up at 4:30 the next morning was to take a walk through Sedona’s residential area was to see the sunrise in the valley and catch a couple of balloons taking an early morning flight.

Balloons rising up through the early morning air in Sedona.

It was already clear to me that my original intent to ride along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon was simply nearly 100 miles of overstretch, obviated by the unexpected headwinds.  Fortunately, I had seen both Sedona and the Canyon before.  Instead, I chose to take up a friend’s suggestion to continue south the next morning along 89A and pick up Route 89 West after having breakfast with him in Prescott.  It turned out to be fortuitous, not only because I happened to see parts of Arizona I had yet unexplored, including the former Wild West town and its “Palace” bar whose famous patrons included Wyatt Earp and his team of vigilantes.  The departure from the plan also provided a respite from those ferocious winds along very scenic roadway before rejoining I40 and dealing with somewhat tamer airstreams for about 90 miles until turning north on U.S 93 to Las Vegas, NV.

The mountain passageway leading out of the old copper mining town of Jerome on the way to Prescott (prounounced: "press-kit").

In addition to being the only state in the Union whose abbreviation includes the first and last letters of the alphabet, Arizona has many towns and cities that can also serve as first names – Winona, Sedona, Jerome, etc. (and no, I did not see a girl in a flatbed Ford while standing on a corner in Winslow.)

The struggle on I40 stimulated two trains of thought.  First, that America is a rough country, its breathtaking scenery belying the fierce challenges of nature that early settlers faced and helping to put an indelible stamp on the American character during the country’s more formative years.  Riding a motorcycle is a far better reminder of that than in the large SUVs that shared the road with me.  The pickup truck (which replaced the four-legged version of the staple “workhorse” for American farmers and ranchers by the 1930’s) and the SUV, in many ways, embody America’s conquest of nature through technology with the progressive love of creature comfort.

The SUV, in particular, symbolizes 21^st century American (sub)urban nostalgia for rugged individualism – albeit in a safe, comfortable seat (most SUVs and pickup trucks in the United States never leave pavement and are as well appointed as luxury sedans).  More than this, the SUV, perhaps more than any other artifact of our time, represents the profligacy of American culture.  Americans, however, may be discovering than you can’t be a rugged individualist in an SUV much as they may be discovering than you can’t be a patriot by adhering a yellow ribbon on the back that says “Support the Troops” (and then discourage your kids from joining the Army, which increasingly has to market its advertising approach to convince you that it’s OK for them to consider military service).  This is one reason why, in fact, I chose riding on two wheels, be more physically challenged, in order to get more close-up with the land and gain a better appreciation of the “American experience”.  (A horse was just a bit too impractical.)

The second train of thought that blew into my mind, however, is less obvious – the obsession with technology in almost every manifestation of the American way of life.  Santa Fe is one of the oldest settlements on the North American continent, with the Spanish presence there dating back to the early 17^th century.  Yet, just a half hour or so outside Santa Fe, a charming artisan city that goes out of its way to maintain its connection to both Old World and aboriginal heritages, is Los Alamos.  It was there that Robert Oppenheimer and his team created arguably the most revolutionary weapon in history, first testing it in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo in July 1945 while quoting the Upanishads.

Cathedral Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, dating back to the 1630s.

Then there is the highway itself.  I40, runs along the same path as U.S. Route 66, which I managed to take parts of.  By the time the famed highway, connecting “Chicago to L.A.” as the folklore song explains, opened in 1929, the United States was the world’s first motorized society, with far-reaching cultural and socioeconomic implications (drive-in or to everything and the crass consumerism of the shopping mall) as well as reminiscent of America’s approach to war.

Consider this:  In 1944, at the height of the Second  World War (still much the cognitive point of reference for most Americans as to what a war should look like, as opposed to the ambiguous “asymmetric” coalition wars of today that really resemble more the norm of great power engagement in the messy affairs of history), nearly two-thirds of Germany’s ultra-professional Wehrmacht was still supplied by horse-drawn wagons. The U.S. Army, an ocean away from its industrial base, was supplied almost entirely by trucks by then.  Even today, the U.S. remains the only power able to move massive amounts of troops and materiel from one side of the globe to the other almost at will.  While this has reflected a triumph of American logistical prowess in the 20^th century, it represents a vulnerability becoming more apparent as the 21^st century moves on.

Since the Civil War, when the industrial North outlasted the agricultural South, America’s approach to war and national security has been to overwhelm or deter its enemies and encourage (or compensate for) its allies with industrial and technological superiority – a material more than moral dominance, the hard power of science over the soft power of art.  For most of that time, it has been enormously successful, although harbingers of its limitations existed, most saliently in the Vietnam War.  (When I had become an officer in 1980, Vietnam was being put quickly in the rear view mirror of the predominant military-industrial establishment, resulting in institutional amnesia on counterinsurgency and other, more “full-spectrum” approaches to human conflict and reverting to the big-war mentality of the Northern European Plain of the Cold War days, reaching its zenith with the greatest tank battles seen since the Russian Front during Desert Storm, the persuasion of the Serbs to abandon Kosovo entirely through the air, and culminating in the short-lived success of “shock and awe” in those very same sands some 14 years later.)

What I witnessed myself in Iraq in 2003-04 was (perhaps) the beginning of the end of the catechism that all national security (and many other) problems must have a technological solution, something that we probably should have learned in Vietnam, in essence a small war (as Max Boot pointed out in his book, The Savage Wars of Peace) that was fought like a big war.  Mogadishu and the peace operations of the 1990’s should have given us further warning that not everything was a nail in need of a hammer.  9/11, the threat of attacks to the information highway of cyberspace that is the infrastructure of our 21^st century economy, and the growing adaptation of our adversaries of remotely piloted vehicles, are all examples of how our own technology can be used against us, with far greater cost in both damages and preventative measures than those they must bring to bear.  In a long war of attrition, at that level, we cannot outlast them, as the North did to the South in the 19^th century or the U.S. did to the Soviet Union in the 20^th.

This is because of what really is not just the predominant challenge to habitual American approaches to national security (the “strategy of annihilation” and attrition of Russell Weigley’s classic, The American Way of War); rather, the emerging preeminent threat to U.S. national security writ large – the growing inability of the country to make sovereign decisions on matters of national policy without considering limitations in especially financial resources and particularly the interests of those outside the country who may control or have influence on them.  Strategic scarcity will characterize the problem set for U.S. policymakers and “deciders” as it once did prior to the Civil War, with one critical update in history – America is no longer an isolated country.

The era of cheap capital is over – we can no longer simply throw money at the Pentagon or any other government agency.  And as much as lawmakers (most of whom, as with economic and cultural elites, now have never served in the military, in foreign policy, or international development) say they love the troops, they love re-election more.  When deciding between prioritizing Social Security and Medicare (the other two big-ticket items on the fiscal budget along with defense and interest payments on the national debt) and national security related programs, it is not too difficult to see how they will tend to vote – like their self-indulgent constituents who, in turn, want their taxes (but not their benefits) cut.  They will vote with their pocketbooks.  This is not a complaint; it’s an observation.

There is no doubt in my mind that the trump restraint that President Obama considered when revising U.S. strategy on Afghanistan was that the U.S. could not indefinitely resource the war there with a blank check.  Same in Iraq. This is the final, decisive reason you won’t see the United States conducting unilateral regime takedowns and wholesale counterinsurgency operations on a nation-building basis for quite some time.  Not just because the American people no longer have the will; they no longer have the wallet.  In all our international engagements, we’ll have to learn to get in the (“whole-of-nation” and multinational) sandboxes and play nice with the others.  Real change, perhaps.

Another real change, as I wrote in some War College papers, is that America will have to learn to think and act more strategically.  It will no longer be able to afford to merely rely on “being lucky than good” as they say in sports.  Or to just throw money at the problem. It will have to be better than lucky:  That means thinking more ahead and with a much bigger picture.  We have to play more like Wayne Gretzky, who was a superior hockey player because he skated “to where the puck [was] going”, not to where it was.

There are two things deeply embedded in our culture that stand very much in the way.  One is that we are a nation that has based its whole socioeconomic model on what an Australian friend of mine calls “galloping consumption” – we spend far more than we save (the fact that we have been living far beyond our means, at governmental, corporate, and individual levels is the real reason we find ourselves in the predicament that will plague us for at least one or two more generations).

Consumers think of the present, want instant gratification, and worry only about what’s in front of them; savers think both bigger and longer, i.e., more strategically.  Books more than bumper stickers.  They become more interested in what’s going on in the larger, more globalized world that affects them and less in what’s going on in Hollywood, which entertains but doesn’t affect them.  Thinking versus responding.  (It may, in fact, force our media to restore a level of professionalism instead of the cheaply produced tabloid journalism that dominates broadcasting of late, but that’s probably wishful thinking.)  If there’s one thing the government can do, it can introduce both financial and regulatory incentives and disincentives that, at all levels, create more balance between consumption and savings and investment.  Get our businesses (and their shareholders) to go beyond the quarterly profit-and-loss statements, for example, so that they (and we with them) and compete better in the global economy.

Meanwhile, it’s become harder than ever to think globally and act locally, whether in national security or even economic life.  Instant communication and information overload, its latest manifestations in the Blackberry and the I-Pad, along with 24/7 media have flattened decision cycles.  We are not allowed to  process information and make up our own minds; rather we must either react or allow others to process it for us.  Another vulnerability resulting from our obsession with technology and gadgetry.  (What do all those people talking on cell phones while failing to concentrate on driving, and causing a danger to everyone around them, have to say that’s all that important and couldn’t wait until they’ve had a chance to think about, anyway?)

The nearly mile-wide Meteor Crater.

Perhaps I saw a sign of that new paradigm, where the very nature we have striven to conquer will force us to expand our minds and not just our credit limits, when I took a break from the windy highway and rolled up to take a look at the Meteor Crater – a nearly mile-wide hole in the ground created by a 150-foot piece of composite metal that crashed into the Earth from outer space some 50,000 years ago.  A long time, indeed, for us, but the blink of a geological eye.

Remnant of the 150-foot, 45-ton piece of metal that crashed into the Earth some 50,000 years ago.

After looking at the crater and the 10-minute film, Collisions and Impacts, I sensed a whole different vulnerability that goes way beyond the challenges above.  Although much less probable than global warming (regardless of what is causing or accelerating it, it is real), the possibility of a meteor pummeling the Earth and sending up a cloud of ash and dust that could do more then shut down air travel like an Icelandic volcano reminded me of all these phenomena (it could shut us down). Both man-made (like oil spills) and natural (like Katrina, earthquakes, and so on) disasters should serve to remind us that the world shapes as much, if not more, than we think we shape it.

For many reasons, therefore, the planet is indeed getting smaller and it behooves us humans to think more on that scale – as the movie in the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum back in Washington posits, more “in the vertical space than the horizontal space”.  This will necessitate an ethic of global cooperation heretofore unseen.  The model for which, however, as Joseph Campbell suggests in The Power of Myth, is the ideal of the United States itself.  As he explains, it’s all on the back of a dollar bill.  One thing I used to tell my friends and colleagues in the United Nations – the world’s problems are so large, so complex and intertwined, and so important and inescapable, our collective yet limited resources could not solve them all at once.  We would still have to choose which ones to address in order of priority, requiring unprecedented levels collaboration.

Americans need to lead that endeavor.  Not only because they must; but, because they can.

Amazing what you can think about in a “wasteland”.